


Snow White's Heart

by Teawithmagician



Category: Salem (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Character Death, Curses, Dark Magic, Devotion, Drama, Dubious Consent, F/M, Family Drama, Light BDSM, Older Man/Younger Woman, POV First Person, Protectiveness, Romance, Werewolves, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 09:54:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7310266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teawithmagician/pseuds/Teawithmagician
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The Snow White's heart,” I say, clenching my teeth. I am thinking about the golden red hair and fair white skin of my stepdaughter I have protected but failed to protect my husband from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snow White's Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate Universe where Magistrate's Hale wife is a werewolf of possibly German or Welsh origin. Relationship with John and Anne. Dubious consent with Petrus who takes advantage of missus Hale at the end of the story.

My husband, my love took me to the city of the black magic, that blasted town of Salem from the stormy mountains where I had grown. My beloved's hair was already touched by snow though mine was earing gold as rye. Rye and snow, the collision made the rumors spread fast like waves.

In the streets and tea-rooms, people talked about the founding father married a woman who seemed more like his daughter than a wife, but they knew nothing about us. Unable to love, they saw only the sin and the filth occupied their hearts. They didn't know how our story started and they didn't care about us for they were blinded by their God's laws, who had forbidden love but allowed rape – so they supposed that our marriage was a rape. By all the means, they were mistaken.

It had never been a rape. It all happened like in the times of the Old Gods when the destiny chose people and the people obeyed. The day I saw my love walking down the river and chanting poems that made the wind calm down and the water sing I fell for him and I said to my mother that I would marry him – or nobody else. When my mother told him about that, he laughed and asked for more cider. And when – me for my name.

Joke or not, he kept on coming into our town on his way to Boston, and as I grew older our talks became longer and more complicated. He brought the books I asked him for, he bought the copies of famous painting just to show me how they looked, and when he and my uncles and aunts came to search for me after the full moon drove me crazy, he was the first to find me under the giant oak roots. He offered me his cloak and his heart, and I took both – but first I demanded his body.

When we arrived in Salem, I felt I was suffocating. I opened the door of the carriage and pressed the glove to my mouth, struggling with the sickness. He clenched my shoulder gently and said quietly, “It will get better.” I nodded, breathing heavily. I smelled witchcraft all around the town, especially in the Church there the most decent men of it gathered, but I kept my mouth shut. I felt witches, but my husband's arms, his beautiful, slender fingers were corrupted with the same stench.

I, a girl from a mountain clan hidden from the eyes of the dead god's servants, blessed my the old forest gods, married a warlock, a he-witch. But the difference between him and those Salem witch women were he was the warlock I loved, and though I couldn't share his ways I owed him my loyalty in all of his doings. So our days in Salem begun.

In the night I was running in the woods wild and free, howling at the moon and hunting small beasts who were stupid enough to cross my ways. In the day I wore a cap and a modest black dress, looked down and never raised my voice for I was the magistrate's wife, I was supposed to fear and shiver afore my husband and my master like a mortal woman ought to.

I kept my smile away, held it in the sleeves of my nightgown. When I tied my love to our marital bed, bit his wrists and sucked on his flesh I made him scream with pleasure. A slave to our love, he gave me everything I demanded, kisses and deaths tastier and sweeter than rare men of the younger age were capable of. He loved me and I loved him as well his daughter, a delicate creature of red hair and blue eyes.

My beloved feared for his daughter the most as the witches had to sacrifice the ones the cherished the most, so I promised him to protect her, but to do it – what an irony – I had to become a part of the Coven. Coven had nothing on me for they knew I paid my price every time the moon rises, fat and round, over the tops of the pines. Humans were like worms for them, but a beast like me was more like an ally, so they unwillingly accepted me.

My condition gave me benefits but also was a part of my never-ending woe. I was a beast and my womb was unable to keep human seed inside: again and again, my beloved filled me in and again and again I lost his gift in streams of blood all other the sheets. When we tried to conceive I persuaded him, I believed once it would be alright but it wouldn't. Mad with anger and despair, I wanted to try again, but he begged me to submit.

“I can give you everything you want,” he told me, sitting before the fire, with me hiding my face at his knees, my teeth shattering, “but I cannot give you a child. There's no spell to make you keep my seed for the wolf in you will tear it apart.”

“I know,” I dug my face deeper between his knees, feeling his fingers running through my hair. “I know there are the things common for the men, witches, and wolves, but I hoped and now it makes me wanna cry.”

“I hoped, too”, he said, and his hand froze on my head. I didn't cry, though, still my heart was bleeding out. I wanted to give birth to his children but I just couldn't. So I decided to devote myself to his daughter, a part of him no one could tear away from the inside of me. 

I walked her steps, I watched with her eyes. Even when she thought she was alone she was never alone for I always kept my eyes on her. But the girl grew older and became more stubborn and reckless when her father ever those. When she started bleeding, her smell changed, and I felt deaf and numb when I firstly found that smell in her bedroom.

The blood was ancient and dead. That was no blood of a girl turning into a woman. That was something more hiding inside my stepdaughter, or, more likely, something more standing behind her. The bronze smell of sacrifice knives and mossy altars stirred my nose and I couldn't remain silent about that.

“Whose blood is in her?” I asked my love while we were drinking tea in the bedroom before walking down to have the breakfast made by the slave-girls. He shook his head, his long white hair resting on his shoulders untied, “This I can't tell.”

I swallowed it. I swallowed it like most of his secrets. I was no human so the witches had nothing on me, but I was no witch to take part in their games: I didn't know what played my husband, but I smell lies and deaths.

To be honest, my love rarely avoided direct questions. He trusted me and talked to me when I need answers, but even if my beloved wanted to show me his... things... - and I was sure he didn't – he couldn't. He was a witch, and I was a beast: what he comprehended I failed to realize. 

Years past, I more and more yielded to the thought I remain childless and focused on how my stepdaughter grew, and she grew old enough to know the love. She felt for the Wanderer, the son of the town who had returned from the war of his own. With this, she crossed the path of the Black Queen, whose cold heart still belonged to the Wanderer she once loved: I heard it pounding with hammers when the Wanderer came. 

“Don't play with him because you play with fire”, I warned my little sheep, “You are standing in the way of the woman who wouldn't forgive and forget easily.” “I am not afraid of her,” she told me boldly not being aware of the fact she should shiver in fear. Was it her father's blood or the ancient bronze that made her so reckless, I asked myself?

The Black Queen enchanted my little stepdaughter by stealing her doll and sending it back with all the demons she could find in the depths of what her kind called Hell. I felt the shadows moving in the corners on their own, the sulfur musk clouding over the floors made my nostrils ache. I knew the worse had happened, but the magic was strong and it tricked me. On my four, like a dog, I walked and smelled the evil, but that only made my head go round.

I was helpless before the dark enchantment and I had no one to ask for help as my beloved was away, doing the things for his Queen he was ought to. But I was the mistress of the house, I was responsible for keeping it safe and I proceeded my search. The smell burned my nose to blood but I made myself check the rooms again and again till I found the source of it. But unfortunately I found the doll too late: it nearly strangled the treasure of my beloved's heart with darkest nightmares.

When my beloved came, persecuted by the terrible feeling of loss, I met him in the doors, blood streaming down my face, my darkened nails clenching the cursed doll. He needed no explanation as his eyes turned from the blue into the storm gray by the seconds: he was in the fury I had never seen him before. He destroyed the doll by his own hands and gave his daughter an amulet to preserve her from any witchery for she wasn't taught to defend all by herself: it wasn't only me he kept in ignorance. He said it was going to be the end of his Queen, and I started to talk, surprised by his readiness to destroy his Coven, the what had always been his crooked family.

“I'm proud of you,” I said, clenching his hand with my still bleeding fingers – he kissed the pain away, he hissed the words but they didn't help – I was hurt by a strong witchery, wolf and woman together, and he couldn't take us in one no matter how hard he tried, “for you don't afraid to attack your bellwether. But do you really not afraid?”

“No, I am not,” he said fiercely. “Me and the Elders, we made her. It's time to show her her place. She was not allowed to even touch Ann and you. How dare she?”

I gave him his cloak when he left, but as I was unable to tie the collar I left the cloak thrown over his shoulders. I kissed him on the lips till it hurt, trying to steal his breath enough to keep me warm in his absence. “A magistrate's wife should be more moderate in her feelings”, he mumbled while I was still kissing him at the door, his eyes laughing. A shadow passed on the top of the stairs as his daughter passed, swift like a young rook.

She saw us, she saw me my hands under his jacket, me glaringly clinging to her father, my love, like one of those brothel women: vivid, smiling, covered with colors. I was more like a raven in my pompously strict black dress, but still, I did what women of Salem were not supposed to: shamelessly enjoyed the closeness with the man I longed for.

“Return victorious,” I asked him, as he tenderly kissed me on my forehead. “If you win, you punish me. Bur if not, I will punish you.”

“I do always win”, he smiled at me mentioning our little game. I waited for him impatiently, when I saw in the window him walking to our house, I told the servant I will open the doors for my husband by myself no matter the nightgown and my loose hair as the darkness will hide me from the stares. I opened the door in a rush, I opened my arms and I choked on my words: I saw his face and he was smiling no more.

The Black Queen, his creation, had killed the Elders and took over the Coven. She showed my love the head of the doyenne and he knelt before her due to the laws of the Sabbath. He kissed her hand, he licked her blood and he and claimed her his Queen for whom he was nothing but a humble servant. 

Could he fight her? Could he reject her authority and demand a duel? I didn't know. But if my love did this way and not another, I believe he had his reasons. But I am afraid his reasons were us: his witch daughter having no idea about the power she contained, and his werewolf wife who was in the Coven, like a wolf among the wolfhounds. We were his weakness and the realization of it made me growl, but I submitted for it was his will.

As it wasn't enough, my stepdaughter had learned about her father's ways. She did it accidentally as it always happened by finding one of his magical toys. She used it with no knowledge and aware and paid with endless fear I saw in her eyes when she was found. She knew it was no human thing, what he saw, a clever girl, he asked no silly questions: she understood who her father was, but still she needed him to tell it aloud.

“Why didn't you...” she cried with tears in her eyes. She held on till the hunters accompanied us home, nodded and smiled weakly. But all her temper broke out when there were no spare ears around.

“Because it wasn't the time,” he tried to explain calmly, nearly pleadingly. “I just wanted to protect you.”

“And you – you had always known,” she turned to me. “Why did you lie to me?”

“Because I promised your father my forever and ever,” I said. I lied. There were no promises to keep the wolf chained, only the free will. My will was to stay by him, holding me in his arms that night he told me he always thought about the times I felt free from my promises, and I reminded him, “There are no chains.”

“You are the happy one to roam unchained”, he told me bitterly and I kissed him on the cheek. "I promised you I'd give you anything you ever wanted, but I just made you a slave for me and my daughter”.

“That's untrue,” I objected. “The price is high, but yes – I am here on my own will. You have my heart, and with my heart goes my allegiance.”

The Grand Rite, the spell my dearest husband wanted to spread among our hunters, torturers, skinners, was now in the hands of the Black Queen. My beloved was depressed with the way the things went. He didn't believe in the Black Queen's power was enough to set the things right. Yes, he said, she fulfilled the demands of their Lord. But did she has the guts to carry on especially if the Rite asked for the life of the one who was her weakness – the Wanderer? 

But the Black Queen didn't fail, though she succeeded not in the way the witches expected and before the Hunter's Moon rose, the blood of the innocent was spilled. The Tormentor had fallen from his own son's hands, and the great groaning was to come to Salem as the Master had accepted the sacrifice, and the Apple was opened. That was the time my beloved took us to the ceiling there the hidden door opened only being sparged with black cock's blood.

There were a lot of things in the ceiling room I remembered: toys and books, and flowers, and the sounds of music trapped forever in dusty cobwebs. I had been there before when my stepdaughter was small enough not to remember what she had seen. And when she saw it again, the world of her childhood, her eyes filled with suspicious and mistrust as though she waited for a trap, but there was no trap.

My beloved asked his daughter if she remembered the room, and I started to take my clothes off, never wanting to wait for the spell to cast: whatever it would be, I would rather meet it being a wolf than a human who was so easy to hurt.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking at me standing before her in Eve's dress. “Returning to her natural form, my dear,” said my husband, my lover, not turning his head on me: he knew I hated him to see me when turning. There wasn't a time to show it to my stepdaughter, too, but did I have the choice?

I tilted my head back. My eyes rolled and I shook like a spindle in the hands of a careless spinner. The fur, the fangs, the bones – it all grew from the inside of me, turning me inside out. My stepdaughter squeaked as she saw me falling apart and when getting assembled into something truly different – there was a woman was a wolf then.

“Ah,” she pressed her tiny white hand to her mouth and turned her head away. “This is disgusting. Is there more you didn't bother to tell me about, father?“

“Only the plague,” my beloved answered shortly, taking his jacket off and sitting down on a chair. “We are safe from it here, though.” He leaned back and took a trinket from the table, playing it in his lovely fingers. He looked calm but I felt his disturbance and hurried to his knees, putting my muzzle on his hip and he patted me absentmindedly.

“So it was the witches who did it. All of the blood, and all of the killing,” she said in a distant voice what made my fur stand on its end. “But what about all those people outside? Are you dooming them for such a painful and terrible death?”

“Well, yes, my love,” said my one and the only mildly. “Everyone but us is doomed. That's the way the Rite goes.”

“Everyone but warlock and witches?” she asked with pure hatred blazing in her every word, and he nodded. And when her eyes burned red just like the eyes of the entity my beloved prayed in the grove, the dark one coming onto the Earth only in the darkest nights of the deepest forests.

“You are a monster!” she shouted, and my dear husband's face melted. His head exploded, showering me with what had been his handsome face. It had exploded like a rotten pumpkin with blood, and brain, and shattered bones. In the last moment of his life I saw his eyes, and what I saw wasn't fear – it was the deepest surprise.

She killed him. Shocked, I failed to realize it. A human in me told herself, again and again, that the second person she cared the most had just killed the first. The daughter of the love of my life had just killed him. Was it how the initiation went among them, the cursed tribe? I remembered stories he was telling me in bed, but I didn't care.

I jumped – through the room , through the table – aiming at her throat, but she sent me into the wall with the inhuman strength that made my ribs crush. “I didn't want to!” she screamed as my skull cracked open and the light went dark. The agony went through my body, I palpitated, wheezing, but the death was all over me – and for the moment I was dead.

To spare you from doubts, I am now writing those words with my own shaking hand in Petrus', the Blind Witch hut. I am still alive, am I not? The beast in me can live till the years will turn its claws and fangs into the dust. My bones fused, my wounds healed, my heart is beating back again. She wanted to kill me – well, luckily she didn't know how to do it right, I admit bitterly.

Petrus the Seer takes care of me and sometimes takes advantage of my body. There is nor love neither lust in his actions, he is just bored and, like most of the witches, he hates to do anything for free, but the price is reasonable low. He always liked me, he let me in when I roamed the forest, waiting for the moon to set and for the sun to give me my human skin. Sometimes asked me for permission to borrow my eyes, and when I agreed, he used them gently. He could just cut them off, but he would never make my husband angry.

There is my husband no more now. There are only rats in lover's body, eating him from the inside, squeaking under his exquisite black jacket, under his well-fitted blouse, only the grave worms under his skin, falling from the mess of what was left of his face. He was such a gallant beau, my dear, unlike all those Essex shepherds, there was a style, there was a breed about him. Comparing to him, Petrus is a savage, but I owe him my life and I let him have some fun as though I am strong enough to stop him at the moment. 

While Petrus is filling me in with curiosity rather than a desire, I lie and think about I have seen. My love wasn't supposed to fall, and especially – to fall from his own daughter's hand. It is unfair, to let the one who you cherish the most kill you, but isn't it how Increase Mather died? Petrus tells me my stepdaughter cries at the funeral where his father sleeps in a nailed coffin, and that the Black Queen decides to take care of her as well as there is a Queen from beyond the seas setting sails to Salem to claim her reign. 

“There will be a war,” Petrus giggles, champing with larvae at the table. I hardly feel my fingers, but still, I try to make a fist, mastering the numb limbs. War or not, this shouldn't bother me for I am no witch and I don't take part in the witches' wars. There is no reason for me in picking sides, yet I have my work to be done those days. Petrus, who reads my minds while I lie naked in his bed under the furs, he asks me, “What kind of work it is then?”

“The Snow White's heart,” I say, clenching my teeth. I am thinking about the golden red hair and fair white skin of my stepdaughter I have protected but failed to protect my husband from.


End file.
